Quotes from Chaim Potok

I drew that memory of my father on the roof...I drew him in all the small and quiet ways I had never thought to draw him before. And it seemed to me that I was closer to him during those early months of his absence than at any other time of my life.

A person has to have a reason for living, and the best reason is another person. Together they can make a plan for their lives.

It intrigued me that I had made no drawings of my father. The mashpia would notice that. But why had I made no drawings of my father?

He always wore dark-blue suits, but I made his suit light blue because he did not feel dark blue to me.

Another time? Why another time? Will another time make a difference, Aryeh?

There are times when those who fear God make themselves very unpleasant as human beings.

And it seemed to me that I was closer to him during those early months of his absence than at any other time of my life.

My father's right to shape my life had been taken from him by the same being who gave his own life meaning - the Rebbe.

Like the French frontier police who thought that some of Picasso's Cubist drawings were plans of the country's defenses.

Is he aware of both—and unaware? Can the mind ride two such separate tracks simultaneously? Concealed ambivalence. Hidden ambiguity. Are we so flawed that we can never truly know our own most secret motives?

Oh, if I could paint this, I thought. Ribbono Shel Olom, if I could paint this world, this clean world of rain and patterns on glass, and trees on my street, and people beneath the trees. I would even paint and draw pain and suffering if I could paint and draw the other, too. I would paint the rain as tears and I would paint the rain as waters of purification. What do they want from me? Ribbono Shel Olom, it's Your gift. Why don't You show them it's Your gift?

How memory accordions time and places disparate moments next to one another like photographic slides on a tray!

Many people feel they are in possession of a great gift when they are young. But one does not always give in to a gift. One does with a life what is precious not only to one's own self but to one's own people.

I cannot pray. I talk to God through my sculpture and painting.' 'That's also prayer.' He smiled faintly, the morning sun on his face. 'The Rebbe said precisely that. You are following the party line, Asher Lev. But we know it is not the same thing, don't we?

It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly," I read in the collection of letters written by Camille Pissarro to his son Lucien, "that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character.… You must harness yourself to drawing.

I told her of a letter Camille Pissarro once wrote to his son about Monet's dealers, who were insisting he exhibit only one kind of painting, the one that had become very popular with collectors. The collectors only wanted Sheaves. Pissarro wrote that he couldn't understand how Monet could subject himself to the demand that he repeat himself. He called it a terrible consequence of success.

a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant...

There is an old Russian saying: When fingernails are being pulled out in Moscow, fingers are being chopped off in the provinces. That saying one can take at full value.

The tiny color planes in the Cézanne, like the pieces of a riddle, exquisitely explored, investigated, probed, resolved, each daub of color another piece of his answer to the greatest riddle of all: how we see and think the world.

What is your dissertation, Ilana Davita?" "Babel and Camus: Twists of Fate and Faith. Babel's The Red Cavalry and Camus's The Stranger.

Basically it's none of our business how somebody manages to grow, if only he does grow, if only we're on the trail of the law of our own growth.

Gossip, gossip, gossip. Rumors. Tongues. 'Life and death are in the power of the tongue,' Ã¢â'¬Â he quoted in Hebrew.

Truth has to be given in riddles. People can't take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed, Lev. You have to give people the truth in a riddle, hide it so they go looking for it and find it piece by piece; that way they learn to live with it.

Millions of people can draw. Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.